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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Tokens to Faces: Investigating Discrete Speech Representations for 3D Facial Animation

The choice of speech representation is critical in speech-driven 3D facial animation. Representations differ in what they encode: SSL features emphasize segmental and semantic cues, neural codecs yield latents optimized for acoustic reconstruction, and ASR-style objectives produce label-based spaces. We evaluate four speech representation families for 3D facial synthesis, comparing their facial reconstruction quality across two facial decoders using objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. We additionally conduct probing analyses that relate tokenized representations to phonetic units and to articulatory deformations. We found that encoding phonetic classes is beneficial for accurate facial animation prediction on both semantic and label-based representations with comparable facial animation quality. From the latter, we introduce an Audio Visual Text-to-Speech (AVTTS) pipeline that leverages, as a shared space, discrete representations to decode speech and 3D facial motion.

03.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Scalable Production Scheduling: Linear Complexity via Unified Homogeneous Graphs

arXiv:2604.23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust. While Reinforcement Learning has shown potential in automating dispatching rules, existing models often struggle with a scalability bottleneck caused by quadratic graph complexity or the architectural overhead of heterogeneous layers. We introduce a unified graph framework that employs feature-based homogenization to project distinct node roles into a shared latent space. This allows a standard homogeneous Graph Isomorphism Network to capture complex resource contention with linear complexity, ensuring low-latency inference for large-scale industrial applications. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting consistent zero-shot generalization. We identify the job-to-machine ratio as the primary driver of policy effectiveness, rather than absolute problem size. Based on this, we propose a hypothesis of structural saturation, demonstrating that policies trained on critically congested instances ($\mathcal{J} \approx \mathcal{M}$) learn scale-invariant resolution strategies. Agents trained at this saturation point internalize invariant conflict-resolution logic, allowing them to treat massive rectangular instances as a sequential concatenation of saturated sub-problems. This approach eliminates the need for expensive scale-specific retraining and prevents overfitting to statistical shortcuts, providing a robust and efficient pathway for deploying RL solutions in dynamic production environments.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bid Farewell to Seesaw: Towards Accurate Long-tail Session-based Recommendation via Dual Constraints of Hybrid Intents

arXiv:2511.08378v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict anonymous users' next interaction based on their interaction sessions. In the practical recommendation scenario, low-exposure items constitute the majority of interactions, creating a long-tail distribution that severely compromises recommendation diversity. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by promoting tail items but incur accuracy degradation, exhibiting a "see-saw" effect between long-tail and accuracy performance. We attribute such conflict to session-irrelevant noise within the tail items, which existing long-tail approaches fail to identify and constrain effectively. To resolve this fundamental conflict, we propose HID (Hybrid Intent-based Dual Constraint Framework), a plug-and-play framework that transforms the conventional "see-saw" into "win-win" through introducing the hybrid intent-based dual constraints for both long-tail and accuracy. Two key innovations are incorporated in this framework: (i) Hybrid Intent Learning, where we reformulate the intent extraction strategies by employing attribute-aware spectral clustering to reconstruct the item-to-intent mapping. Furthermore, discrimination of session-irrelevant noise is achieved through the assignment of the target and noise intents to each session. (ii) Intent Constraint Loss, which incorporates two novel constraint paradigms regarding the diversity and accuracy to regulate the representation learning process of both items and sessions. These two objectives are unified into a single training loss through rigorous theoretical derivation. Extensive experiments across multiple SBR models and datasets demonstrate that HID can enhance both long-tail performance and recommendation accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in long-tail recommender systems.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Attribute Inference from Interactive Targeted Ads

作者:

arXiv:2606.15209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Targeted advertising systems can pair audiences selected by advertisers with ad units that expose visible user actions. When an interaction remains linked to the campaign that elicited it, the advertiser may receive an observation tied to a user rather than only an aggregate report. We model that channel as a noisy oracle for attribute inference. The model separates targeting predicates, exposure, interaction, and disclosure. These boundaries capture the gap between eligibility and delivery, and the gap between interaction and advertiser visibility. We build a reproducible benchmark using synthetic populations calibrated with public data, each with known sensitive labels. A generated campaign semantics layer provides topic variants and response priors. The simulator generates the ground truth, event traces, disclosed observations, and metrics. The evaluation compares Bayesian, supervised, positive and unlabeled, and adaptive attacks under common campaign and disclosure definitions. The final evaluation uses four topic variants, seven simulator seeds, and two interaction settings. Repeated campaigns with identity exposure produce measurable but bounded inference signal. At $160$ campaigns, Bayesian and supervised attacks reach about $0.64$ AUC in the main setting and about $0.65$ AUC in the higher interaction setting. Disclosure policy is the strongest control. Aggregate reporting removes the evaluated oracle input tied to users. Type filtering and randomized disclosure reduce the released signal. The result is a model, artifact, and defense evaluation method for privacy in interactive targeted advertising. The code is available at https://github.com/P-HOW/Interactive-Ad-Oracle.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2511.07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

VFACamou: View-Fused Adversarial Camouflage for Environment-Adaptive Physical Evasion

Adversarial camouflage in the physical world remains highly challenging, particularly under UAV reconnaissance where targets undergo continuous geometric changes and extreme illumination variations. Existing methods either optimize 2D digital perturbations that fail to generalize to dynamic viewpoints or produce visually unnatural textures that cannot be deployed in real scenarios. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end framework for adversarial camouflage generation that automatically produces wearable adversarial patterns and maintains stable attack performance in real physical environments with changing viewpoints, poses, and lighting conditions. Our method integrates UV-volume rendering with a diffusion-based texture generator, enabling consistent appearance under varying scales, poses, and lighting conditions. To ensure environmental realism, we propose an illumination color consistency estimator that extracts dominant background attributes and guides a natural texture loss to align the generated UV texture with the surrounding environment. A multi-scale dynamic training strategy further enhances robustness against viewpoint shifts and body deformation. Extensive experiments across multiple mainstream detectors demonstrate that our method achieves strong and stable physical attack performance while maintaining high perceptual naturalness, reducing human detection rates without introducing unnatural artifacts.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

arXiv:2603.27998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Feynman–Kac formula for the heat equation with a one-center point interaction in $d=3$

arXiv:2606.11677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Schrödinger operators with a one-center point interaction, formally defined by \begin{align*} -\Delta_\alpha=-\Delta+\alpha\,\delta_0(\cdot), \end{align*} for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}$, and the associated heat equation \begin{align} \partial_t u=\tfrac{1}{2}\Delta_{\alpha} u,\quad u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}).\label{eq:HEapp} \end{align} Here $\Delta$ denotes the Laplacian (self-adjoint on $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$) and $\delta_x$ the Dirac measure at $x$. The operator $-\Delta_\alpha$ can be realized either as a self-adjoint extension of $-\Delta|_{C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\})}$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$, or as the norm-resolvent limit of $-\Delta+\lambda_\varepsilon V(\cdot/\varepsilon)$ for suitable $\lambda_\varepsilon$ and $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$. In this paper we construct, for each $t>0$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}$, a probability law on path space and a normalizing function $G_t^\alpha(x)$ giving the following probabilistic representation of the solution to the associated equation: \begin{align*} u(t,x)=G_t^\alpha(x)\,\mathbb{E}\bigl[u_0\bigl(W^{t,x}(t)\bigr)\bigr], \end{align*} where $\{W^{t,x}(s):0\le s\le t\}$ is a continuous process depending on $(t,x,\alpha)$. The result provides a Feynman–Kac type formula for the heat equation with a one-point interaction in three dimensions.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Physics-Informed Attention Mechanism and Generalization Capability of Deep Learning-Based Grain Growth Evolution Prediction

arXiv:2606.17235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) models for grain growth prediction are typically trained on idealized synthetic data, yet practical applications require generalization to conditions outside the training distribution. This study evaluated the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability of the trained model from our previous study across three test cases, including experimental microstructures, microstructures characterized by a bimodal grain size distribution, and abnormal grain growth. To further probe whether physics-informed architectural design could improve robustness under these different conditions, a boundary-masked attention mechanism was proposed specifically for grain growth, constraining attention to grain boundary pixels. Both the baseline and the proposed physics-informed attention model were evaluated without retraining or fine-tuning on the OOD data. Both models successfully generalized to all three test cases, yet the boundary-masked attention mechanism provided substantial improvements, with the most notable gains for microstructures characterized by a bimodal grain size distribution, where Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) improved from \num{0.6221} to \num{0.7609} and mean grain size ($\overline{R}$) error decreased from \operatorname{SI}{8.75}{\percent} to \operatorname{SI}{3.57}{\percent}. The attention heatmap analysis revealed that the boundary-masked attention model learned to concentrate attention on large grain boundaries in a manner consistent with curvature-driven grain growth physics, emerging from training without being explicitly encoded into the architecture. These results indicate that models trained on synthetic data can generalize to diverse OOD conditions without retraining, and that physics-informed attention may improve accuracy when the boundary morphology matches the training domain.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

arXiv:2605.14738v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has promoted task-aware layer pruning as a way to improve model performance on particular tasks, as shown by TALE. In this paper, we investigate when such improvements occur and why. We show first that, across controlled polynomial regression tasks and large language models, such pruning yields no benefit on in-distribution (ID) data but consistently improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy. We further show empirically that OOD inputs induce layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles that deviate from the corresponding ID profiles. This leads to a geometric explanation of task-aware pruning: each task induces a task-adapted geometry, characterized empirically by the representation profiles observed on ID inputs. OOD inputs can introduce a distorted version of the task-adapted geometry. Task-aware pruning identifies layers that create or amplify this distortion; by removing them, it shifts OOD representational norms and pairwise distances toward those observed on the adapted distribution. This realigns OOD inputs with the model's task-adapted geometry and improves performance. We provide causal evidence through controlled distribution shifts and residual-scaling interventions, and demonstrate consistent behavior across model scales.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Recursive perturbation approach to time-convolutionless master equations: Explicit construction of generalized Lindblad generators for arbitrary open systems

arXiv:2506.04095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a recursive perturbative expansion for the time-convolutionless (TCL) generator of an open quantum system in a generalized Lindblad form. This formulation provides a systematic approach to derive the generator at arbitrary order while preserving a Lindblad-like structure, without imposing assumptions on the system or environment beyond an initially uncorrelated state. The generator is written, at all orders, in a canonical form, which also corresponds to the minimal dissipation condition, which uniquely specifies the decomposition of the generator into Hamiltonian and dissipative contributions. To validate the method and show its effectiveness in addressing non-Markovian dynamics and strong-coupling effects, we compute the generator explicitly up to fourth order.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base. In pure-text long-context LLMs, retrieved-context use follows the U-shaped "lost-in-the-middle" effect of Liu et al. (2024): information at the start and end of context is used, the middle is lost. Whether this transfers to deployed multimodal KB-VQA is open. To close this gap, we design the first controlled probe of reader-side position dependence in multimodal KB-VQA: a gold-position protocol in which only the gold passage's prompt slot varies within question. We run it on three open-source 7B/8B VLM readers and two KB-VQA benchmarks at k up to 20. The shape flips from U to primacy: gold-at-first beats gold-at-last by 16 to 26 points on every reader-by-benchmark cell, an effect we call "Lost at the End". Three targeted ablations narrow the cause: a text-only control shows the multimodal setting amplifies an already-present text-mode primacy 2.2 to 4.5 times, and image-position and distractor-shuffle ablations together pin the locus to prompt slot 0 of the instruction-tuned reader. On a frozen reader, three retrieval-side fixes (MMR, oracle reranking, rank-based reordering) all leave the gap intact (no separable improvement). Our findings indicate that recall@k is the wrong metric for deployed KB-VQA and that closing the gap requires reader-side intervention; we release our protocol as a controlled instrument for evaluating such interventions.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Airport Terminal Passenger Queue Forecasting for Departure Gates and Security Checkpoints

arXiv:2606.07622v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate passenger queue forecasting in airport terminals is essential for efficient departure operations, as it enables proactive congestion management. However, time-varying passenger demand and heterogeneous facility usage across multiple departure facilities make forecasting challenging. In this work, we propose a passenger queue forecasting framework that learns historical passenger flow patterns from operational data. The proposed model employs a Transformer-based architecture to capture temporal dependencies and inter-facility correlations using past queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints, together with passenger throughput at check-in islands. The learned representations are mapped to two facility-specific prediction heads to predict queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints. Experimental results demonstrate accurate forecasts up to two hours ahead. The proposed approach offers practical real-time decision support for proactive queue management and staff reallocation in airport terminal operations.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Cortical activity during narrative discourse production in individuals with post-stroke aphasia and controls measured via functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Introduction: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder with a significant negative functional impact. Much of the research on aphasia has focused on word-level language comprehension and production. Further evaluation of discourse-level tasks, both at behavioral and neural levels, will allow for an ecologically valid understanding of the functional implications of language impairment in this population. Method: This study evaluated bilateral frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical activity during computer-based narrative production in 14 young neurotypical individuals, 17 individuals with post-stroke aphasia, and 15 age-matched neurotypical participants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) was measured during narrative production following short video clips and compared to HbO during counting aloud. In addition, behavioral measures quantifying in-task performance were correlated with averaged HbO values. Results: Young neurotypical individuals showed greater cortical activity in bilateral language regions for narrative production compared to counting aloud. In contrast, people with aphasia showed positive condition-related effects in the right frontal ROI and the age-matched group showed positive condition-related effects in the left frontal and right precentral ROIs. Each group showed different patterns in relationships between cortical activity and discourse performance measures. Conclusion: Overall, young participants showing more consistent condition-related effects for narrative discourse production than individuals with aphasia and age-matched controls. This study shows the potential for fNIRS to evaluate cortical activity for ecologically valid language tasks in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.